The most difficult human phenomena to achieve whether it be for a political, social or psychological reason is a propensity for or lack thereof for the consummate act of, change.  We are too often simply creatures of habit and the vast majority of any of us simply and usually feel entirely more comfortable in familiar surroundings or remaining steadfast with our particular set of values or beliefs.  When we learn something new or acquire new information the most successful manner of retention is accomplished through repetition; more times we hear something the greater the likelihood that it will be remembered.  The repetition of material also has the impact of lending that material credibility.  In the simplest terms, it becomes familiar.  The unknown is scary and if most of us have a choice, we simply choose to remain where we are or hold on to a familiar thought or idea.  For the majority of us and the various situations in which we find ourselves, change is not usually an acceptable consideration unless of course, we are simply forced by what we might consider as dire circumstances beyond our control.
          The concept of God has become so terribly integrated into the political, social and personal psyche of the average Western individual that there exists no desire or ability for making an iota of change in that considered omniscient presence, that it would be likened unto the physiologically total redesigning of man himself without a heart or any equal replacement of that vital organ that is absolute necessary for life.  Medically we have been successful at replacing the human heart with a substitute of another living heart, but we haven't even been able to achieve a successful mechanical heart even with our great advances in medical technology.  We are even further away from ever being able to create a real Frankenstein by way of the replacement of one living or nonliving brain for another.  Besides the great difficulty of, in some cases an impossibility of replacing the physical structures of the human anatomy, it is often equally difficult if not impossible to replace firmly imprinted ideas and concepts even when the most rational effort.
          It is quite conceivable that in our Western culture it will be almost impossible to ever totally eradicate from the minds of many individuals their unyielding belief that God is a living, factual and spiritual reality.  To even begin to comprehend the nature of this steadfast and stubborn resistance to any change in one's spiritual belief system is to possibly abandon any reasonable hope that a substantial portion of today's Christian individuals will even begin to make the transformation necessary for full participation in the Age of Reality; they sooner die than abandoned their believe in God.  A full understanding of deeper meaning of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness requires immersing oneself into a liberal education that carefully traces the history of man's religious developments without any moral interpretation or any narrowed guidance provided by any particular religious orientation.  That just isn't at all likely for the majority of our citizens to ever experience, most simply because our education system is so biased to the concepts of this outmoded religion that was politically conceived and is and always has been overly-dominated and exclusively influenced by outlandish mythologies long before there was any substantial intellectual, liberal and spiritual enlightenment; thus, the inevitable death to change for so many lost and pitiful souls of unintentional spiritual ignorance.  Of course, in the real absence of any heaven or hell, there is no ultimate consequence to anyone possessing or denying that there is a God in some specific religion that supposedly claims to have and holds the keys to salvation and immortality.  A strong and even irrefutable belief in a God is, in and of itself, of no real consequence to the well-being of any individual.  What is tragically at risk, which history has clearly confirmed, are the various constraints placed on an individual by the despotic religious vicars that claimed to have that moral authority to dictate at the usually undisclosed discretion and direction of that supposedly omniscient God.  What is so interesting is that this spiritual enslavement which is usually consensual exists totally in the realm of cerebral and psychological consciousness.  I will concede that thoughts are real, but the imaginary constructs resulting from man's capacity to rationalize and intellectualize are apt to have no basis in reality.  Without any concrete, empirical or observable evidence, those “real” thoughts are only fictitious mental images.
          This damning reality can be so overwhelming as to dissuade those few who have escaped this spiritual curse from ever sharing their enlightenment.  I, for one, am so deeply concerned for mankind’s ultimate salvation that this horrid realization essentially robs me of the joy that I should be personally experiencing on a daily basis.  Instead, I painstakingly put to these written pages those realities that I have been so fortunate to have uncovered or innocently exposed to my simply keeping my mind and eyes opened.  Let me be very clear; there is absolutely nothing intellectually or spiritually unique or even gifted about my realizations of these political, psychological, sociological or spiritual matters.  What has gifted me with the ability to share this easily revealed reality is a lifetime of experiences that often bordered on the very fringes of society while still being fully immersed into an intimately and intellectual familiarity with our Western culture’s most highly revered mythologies.  I had even sought the religious education from amongst a number of Christian seminaries from the State of Georgia to California that never materialized simply because I was unable to find a single Christian seminary that actually taught only the basic teachings of Jesus.  These lifeless seminaries that purported these supposedly religious Christian doctrines and dogmas were too often a horrid enigma that too drastically departed from the emphatic teachings of love and inclusion for which Jesus was essentially crucified.  Our salvation is not found in the realms of exclusion and hate, but only in the ability to embrace all of our neighbors with love.  And my search was not at all colored by my sexuality as I never came out of that horrid gay closet until I was 35 years old.  I was however, very much a social liberal even though I was politically registered as a Republican; I simply harbored no hatreds are prejudices for anybody.  I have had the wonderful and unique advantage of living and experiencing both sides of most major social issues.
          I have been accused, and I choose that word most deliberately, of being extraordinarily “religious.”  These false accusations are truly understandable in light of my thorough and extensive use of the standard vocabulary of most Western educated individuals.  The church was once the sole source of any education and the words and definitions thereof are often imbued with religious connotations reserved for only Christian interpretation.  Of course, the Hebrew are known academically as being our first educators in Western culture, so even before the Christians, education was the sole matter of liturgical interpretation.  I would ask that you indulge me a simple demonstration; let me give you a short list of words for you to read aloud, only one at a time and move on to the next word only after your mind has played a mental tape of images that are most likely initiated with just the utterance of the word itself.  Begin with the word, god....  hell....  salvation....  church....  sin....  Jesus....  priest....  glory.... angel....  heaven.... truth....  devil....  faith....  belief....  cross.... 
          It is of little consequence to expect anyone to come to an understanding any given reality without first giving them the tools necessary for their own discovery.  Those tools of disclosure and thought are essentially the words used to convey or describe the meaning of a new concept or should I say the awakening to a reality that had been previously ignored or denied.  There truly is nothing new under the sun and the potential of discovering existing realities has always been there from the beginning of time.  No matter how careful one might be in describing and uncovered reality with new words, our minds will tend to translate and interpolated at every instance any concept with the use of old meanings and definitions.  After all, this is the only language that we have access to according to our cultural heritage and most all of our Western languages translate with the use of the same definitions and meaning.  The best manner in describing this innate difficulty is the depiction of an artist attempting to paint a picture in vivid colors without the use of the three primarily colors of blue, red and yellow; it is virtually impossible.  I just haven’t as yet proposed the contents of a new vocabulary.
          The persecution of European Jews prior to World War II has presented me with a phenomenal example of how one woman was able to survive the emotional trauma of persecution.  Effie’s mother, a Jewish woman, had shielded her young daughter from the psychological pains of discrimination and persecution by simply raising Effie as simply an educated girl who was given absolutely no religious education or identity nor where she imbued with any cultural biases are prejudices.  Effie wasn't even made aware of the existence of any religion and to her knowledge she was complete unto herself with an acquired and usually high degree of respect for all peoples; she wasn't taught to identify discriminatory differences in those individuals that were an integral part of her social environment.  When Effie and her mother were finally able to emigrate to the United States, Effie’s mother had to educate to her as to the existence of so many different religions and the fact that so many Americans felt the necessity to being identified with some particular religion as well as the discriminatory labeling of others.  Effie shared with me her own true sense of feeling complete as a human being without the need or want of a religion.  She had simply developed into a confident woman with good morals and values that were simply not imbued with any sense of discrimination; every human being was of equal value, which then explained my feelings of being so accepted by her even though I was a homosexual; she was colorblind as well as a racially blind.  I was so fortunate to have met Effie in her fifties where she had been married to the same man for the entirety of her adult life.  She was active with organizations that dealt with the survivors of the Holocaust, not for any religious reasons; simply because their suffering was the result of the inhumane treatment that was in no way humanly or politically justified.  For Effie it would have been equally inhumane had the victims been Christians, Buddhists or Moslems.  Her involvement with those particular organizations dealing with the survivors of the Holocaust was a natural for her, as she was in many ways, a survivor herself.
          It was precisely the absence of a vocabulary that could have been imbued with religiously meaningful words that effectively shielded Effie from discrimination.  Effie was given a moral and ethical education by her mother for what she thought was only for the sole purpose of her having respect for others and not to protect her from undo social snares of a prejudiced culture.  The serendipitous and beautiful result was the development of a truly loving individual that was devoid of any religious hatred or bigotry; more truly an imitation of Jesus in nature than most any Christian I have ever met and yet Effie was rightfully of a Jewish heritage.  What this suggests to me is the reality that it may take several generations of truly humanistic child rearing were the primary emphasis is the love and respect of every human being (loving thy neighbor) without any regard as to one's religion heritage.  Effie’s wonderful nature was most simply the result of learning to love her neighbors and to respect herself as a loving human being without the need of any specific religious identity having taken the responsibility for defining her humanity.  Effie was truly a full citizen of the world; an individual truly worthy of they ‘universal’ passport.
          I live in a time and place in which change is a multidimensional reality where there exist no absolutes except for those who managed to maintain their own fantasies and mythologies as the god-awful truth.  There are still a significant number of individuals within this Judeo-Christian American Society that still wish to deny the theories of evolution as opposed to creationism.  And what are even more astonishing to me are those countless well-educated brilliant theologians who are infinitely better-educated individuals in the truly objective history of Christianity and are still able to maintain their increasing tenuous positions of maintaining an unyielding faith in light of so much reality contrary to the contrived mythologies of Constantine and early church politicians.  The enormous body politic of Christianity is essentially made up of sincere earnest individuals who truly believe they are living what they consider as God's will.  It is the head of this body politic that is corrupted by the neurotic clutches of greed; the endless need for more and more control and the gluttonous want of absolute power over spiritual lives of others.  The mind control ability of the Christian clergy has become so perfected over the hundreds of years of trial and error that even they have come to truly believe their own mythologies to be the absolute truth.  I strongly suspect that it will take hundreds of years and a number of generations of slow incremental changes before this intelligent but spiritually stubborn animal called man will ever come to his senses and recognize that he alone is the creator of his own fate.  I find it far more comforting knowing that I am what I am as the result of thousands of years of evolution.  To me that is far more miraculous than the magical or any imaginary creation by some universal wizard.
          There is no doubt that we have already begun this Age of Reality and there are those of us who have already embraced the most basic tenets of this greater age of man's enlightenment with open arms.  I am tempted to be saying that it is man's ultimate enlightenment, but like Jesus had proclaimed, “Greater things shall ye do after I....”  I do not expect any foreseeable change in the near future as the problem remains that the establishment is still deeply rooted in this tradition of the designed ignorance and spiritual slavery of the masses, and as long as the political and religious establishment benefits from this spiritually impoverished society they will continue to disburse only those educational materials that so avidly support their mythology and all of this conservative and stubborn stance, at the great expense that accompanies the denial of the value of a truly liberal education.
          Reality will not change, not even for God and the true libertarian must simply exercise patience and at whatever risk, make available the best sources of reality to any that might best benefit, not only for themselves but others that they may justly and rightfully influence.  Whereas Christianity was manufactured to specifically serve the masses and elicit from them absolute obedience and conformity to their civil and spiritual slaveholders, reality is a truly individual empowerment that requires each man and woman to recognize their own unique autonomy as well as their responsibility for the individual well-being for those closest to them.  It is the absolute antithesis of by bodily and spiritual slavery.  As we all know, there is little hope of expecting anybody to actually change their religion or their cherished views of this expansive universe from where they presently feel so terribly comfortable without some monumental help and persuasion that is beyond the limited grasp of most any of us.  If any significant change can be at all expected, it will have to be in the spirit of the poet, Kahlil Gibran, who had suggested just what the role of a true teacher ought to be; a teacher is not one who so much imparts knowledge to another.  He is instead, one that is able to bring out in the individual something that is already there.  If it's not self-evident, move on!
          I would love to be able to wave a magic wand and free everyone from any intellectual or spiritual shackles that may prohibit them from being able to perceive the same cognitive and empirical realities that appear to be so blatantly obvious to my own satisfaction.  This is truly a miraculous world in which we live.  My wanting to share all of this with you could be seen as rather selfish and unrealistic in that it only serves my intentions with the idea that I believe it to be in the best interest of any individual.  If I am to expect anyone to make any significant changes as the result of independently arriving at some newly discovered empirical reality, then I must leave it solely to the independent ingenuity and ability of the individual, and that includes you.  I might offer as some aid to that discovery some of the intellectual tools that I have found most useful in procuring my own bits of knowledge and understanding.  You're an entirely on your own as I most sincerely have absolutely no desire to be anybody's guru!
          As I have suggested earlier, the number one tool is the proper use of a vocabulary that will help us avoid the usual pitfalls of societal and spiritual brainwashing.  Perhaps the easiest change that we are more apt to be able to achieve with some success is the elimination of certain devious words in our vocabularies.  I may later add to this list but for the present the key words that are most deceitful in their current use are; faith, belief (believe), truth and know (knowing).  It is also very helpful if the individual will use only the personal pronoun “I” and avoid the use of “you,” “we” and “they.”  This is not a game or some trickery employed for the desired execution of some hidden agenda.  It is simply the use of our present vocabulary to highlight the fallacies inherent in so much of what we have learned and led to believe it is the absolute “truth” which brings us to the use of the word, truth.  The use of the word truth is like placing a stamp of approval or authenticity to any statement that is so claims to being factual when in fact, only the statement itself is true and the “fact” thereof may or may not be part of reality.  I guess what I'm really trying to say is, think for yourself!
          If you were to ask of me, which of the four words should one make the greatest effort to avoid?  I would most naturally respond with that reliable choice of “D. All of the above.”  For example:  “I want you to have faith, and believe me, that everything I tell you it is the absolute truth!  The fact that it is found in the Word of God, the Bible is the best reason to believe that it is true.”  This is the dilemma; if you truly “believe” that the Bible is the written word of God, then we have very likely come to our first roadblock to reality.  Let's take for example, the concept of original sin.  I would first ask you, do not take on faith, anything that I tell you to believe.  If what I share with you is simply not self-evident to you, then please, move on as though I never shared any differing thought with you.  Now, back to the concept of original sin, I would simply ask the following question of any mother.  “Please tell me.  Was the first thought that came to mind when your child was born and first presented to you for bonding, ‘WOW! Another lovely little sinner!’”  I have asked that question to a number of mothers, even Christian mothers, and not one ever responded in the affirmative!  It is self-evident to any loving mother that her newborn child is as pure and innocent as is the first smile that appears on that infant’s new and innocent face.
          I truly recognize that we do not live in a perfect world nor do I expect that we shall ever live in that fabled Shangri-La.  I am however, hopeful that more of us can at least come to understand and attempt to demonstrate that Gestalt concept of, “If you expect and want a change in your world; then first, make a change in yourself.”  Reality never changes; it is our cognitive recognition of reality that will more likely bring about a change in our own self-image and the degree of confidence that we have in our ability to have a positive and possibly profound impact on others in our social environment.  Our effort at learning to love one another unconditionally is the key to our experiencing a more meaningful joy in our lives.  If there is any downfall to our hoped-for enlightenment, it is the discovery that most of our friends and associates are likely unable to experience any true joy without the use of social opiates that only provide a temporary relief.
          I find it sad that so many very sincere and loving individuals truly believe that they have found something so terribly special by giving themselves over so totally to their religion, particularly those “born-again” Christians.  And I am always hesitant to intrude into that blissful state that is very likely the result of denial or ignorance as there is no promise that they will ever be able to display the needed intellect to ever likely comprehend any reality that is or has always been such an obvious anathema to their present state of mind.  The slave was never intended to think for himself and the whole spiritual demeanor of Christianity has always been one of denial; denial of one's true worth, denial of the ability to think for one's self and most importantly of all, the ever perennial denial of our salvation without the intervention of the church.

                                              CONTINUE READING